A summary of C. C. Goen's Broken Churches, Broken
Nation

Religious institutions of the United States in the early and middle
nineteenth century closely followed and contributed to the larger national
efforts. Thus, as C. C. Goen describes in Broken Churches, Broken
Nation, the schisms in the dominant Protestant denominations in
the 1830s and the 1840s both foreshadowed and prepared for the more
destructive civil crisis to come.

In order to spread across the country, the largest churches at the
beginning of the nineteenth century adopted an evangelical strategy, which
used revivals to emphasize the importance of personally identifying with
Christianity through conversion. This matched and reinforced the popular
individualist sentiment, and helped to provide a broad sense of shared
national identity. Suppressed by the primary goal of maximizing their
membership, however, were underlying moral inconsistencies such as the
institution of slavery.

The ways in which slavery manifested itself in sectional power
relationships within the denominations corresponded closely to the problems
that slavery would later cause for the whole country. Many persons of the
time, as well as later historians, felt strongly that the churches helped
provide a sense of unity holding the country together; many church members
and other contemporary observers explicitly warned that the denominational
disunion portended ill for the nation. In addition, the way in which the
churches split laid conceptual groundwork for many of the developments in
the national crisis.

Early in the book, Goen boldly asserts that “[c]ritical
interpretation is precisely what distinguishes a historian from a narrator
or chronicler”[Goe1985, p16]. Indeed, throughout the book there are hints of his
criticism, but he ends the book with a direct, powerful critique that takes
both denominational sections to task for subordinating morality to their
desire to grow, and then for vilifying the opposing section without
providing a program for practical social change.